Director: Julian Palmer
Running time: 1hr 55mins
As a reviewer, the prospect of a nearly two-hour movie about psychedelics filled me with dread. My past experience has been that cinema and mind-altering substances do not mix well – but duty calls and I said to our editor Jack – OK send it over.
In spite of my apprehension, I was pleasantly surprised. Surprises are the joy of IFL.
With Contemplations: On The Psychedelic Experience, director Julian Palmer has given us a deeply flawed but, in parts, a rather beautiful piece of work. Technology has moved on from the dread days of lava lamps and sunflowers – Palmer and their team use CGI to produce wonderful simulacra of the visual realties of the universe as seen through the eyes of someone who has taken psychedelics. Personal disclaimer – from the age of fifteen to my early twenties I took a range of psychedelics, predominantly LSD, most weekends. I am happy to report that Palmer, the editor and production supervisor, Timothy Parish and the animators hit the target – what you see on the screen is a believable rendition of the psychedelic experience.
Aesthetically, then, the film is first rate. Parish’s editing is crisp. The soundtrack including music composed by Palmer is well chosen – suitably ethereal and redolent of spirituality at key moments in the text. I thought it an excellent idea to divide the narrative into titled themes such as Initiations and two of particular interest to your reviewer – Complications and Alien Beings. Serendipity – the last two are accompanied by, for me personally, the two stand-out animation sequences where happily some humour intrudes into the otherwise sombre tone of proceedings.
On that note, there is much more sobriety running through this film than you might expect. In fact, Palmer has made an unashamedly polemical movie, specifically focused on the movement to legalise the use of psychedelics in Australia – this is very much an Australian movie. The approach taken is to build the case for legalisation through talking heads interviews with various people who recount their experiences with psychedelics. Many of the interviews are interspersed with animated visualisations of the experiences the interviewees are describing.
Palmer is a doyen of the Australian psychedelic movement and his specific gift to humanity has been the development of changa – a smokable mixture of the synthesised hallucinogen DMT. Palmer and his colleagues who we meet in the interviews come across as being driven by an amalgam of spirituality, science, and commerce – as the narrative develops, we begin to suspect the latter has come to the fore and the movement truly is a business.
There are obviously counter-points to this kind of venture, which need to be addressed. As the filmmakers are making the case for legalisation, they have to confront the potential harm issue or as they benignly phrase it – Complications. Psychedelics can seriously fuck you up. It is a hard one to call, but some people may have predispositions that psychedelics will trigger acute and then chronic psychological trauma – a bad space indeed. Here though, the filmmakers argue the case that psychedelics are relatively safe to use, in a spiritual setting, with the help of experienced guides. The emphasis is on the substance as sacrament – hedonism is definitely out, and teenage kicks are a no-no.
We are given a cautionary account of a bad trip. The interviewee is someone from the electronic music world and they are a natural storyteller, delivering their tale with sparkling humour. Accompanying the narration is a superb Simpsonesque animation by Levin Diatchenko, dramatically titled The Ipswich Exorcism. The protagonist took a huge dose of acid (there is fair bit of drug bragging in the movie) and walked through the city of Ipswich, Queensland, ending up being arrested and wrestled to the ground by the police. The sequence is a true delight, Diatchenko is some animator, and this segment could stand alone as a piece of work possibly as a YouTube short. As it is, this is great cinema.
Following the account, it is up for debate as to whether the filmmakers make their case for safety’s sake. But given that even though we know the numbers of human beings killed or maimed in road traffic accidents – and that the remorseless logic of capitalism means even raising the idea of proscribing cars is seen as absurd – well, maybe they have a point.
Then we come to Alien Beings. There does seem to be a body of evidence that certain types of hallucinogens – ayahuasca, the natural source of DMT and peyote cactus, the source of mescalin – can induce a sensation of having encountered alien beings or spiritual forces that reference themes from organised or folk religions or mythologies. Palmer portrays the encounters extremely well. From my own experience I can vouch that – there is something there. OK – I am an empiricist. When I took mescalin – two milk bottles (it was so long ago we had glass milk bottles back then) turned into penguins which then waddled across the room. The birds then morphed into halos of pure white light radiating love and protection – I sensed I had encountered a pair of guardian angels. At some level of reality, they have been with me ever since.
The case study Palmer uses is that of a masseur and physiotherapist who recounts their experience of taking DMT. And it’s quite a tale the guy has to tell. The masseur is a white middle aged man with no prior interest in South Asian cosmology. As the DMT took hold, he recounts being transported to a Hindu temple where he was embraced by the elephant god Ganesh. To illustrate the adventure, we are given a delicious animation by Deepak Subba titled Vision of Ganesh – all brilliant fluorescent colours – the depiction of Ganesh is a tour de force.
The masseur smiling sums up his reaction to what must have been a startling experience with the movie’s best line … the Hindus were right! Like the Ipswich wayfarer, he is a fine storyteller. And as an added plus point for me, he also seemed to be less invested in Palmer’s psychedelic industrial complex than many of the other talking heads.
Elsewhere, the meld between the spiritual – which Palmer seems duty-bound to maintain – and the commercial – which I presume is much more in Palmer’s enlightened self-interest to promote – reaches the level of a Spinal Tap parody at times. Here are a couple of my favourite pieces from the movie. I swear I am not making them up.
Two of the interviewees are introduced by onscreen captions that read:
X is a sorcerer, musician, esoteric entrepreneur, and creator of the Spinal School.
X is a rites of passage guide who coaches executives and entrepreneurs in flow states and sacred leadership.
Definitely a hit in Silicon Valley, then.
But beyond my suspicions that this is a little too industrially-motivated, there is another major problem with the movie; one which I would guess would make it pretty unwatchable for many IFL viewers. It is a curiously colonialist project. The Australian psychedelics movement has a dilemma in that the only indigenous source of plant-based hallucinogens is the psylocibin mushroom, which does not really cut it when compared to the more powerful substances such as ibogaine from West Africa, ayahuasca from South America, and peyote from Central America. The movement appears to seek a resolution to the issue by a mixture of cultural appropriation of the rituals of hallucinogen use from other continents, combined with home-based synthesisation of the chemicals required – as with Palmer’s smokable DMT.
I would suggest a more organic and ethical approach would have been to explore the experiences of Australia’s autochthonous peoples and the longue durée of the ecology of humans, plants, and landscape in the region. The only reference to Aboriginal culture is when we see a white man tripping and looking at a piece of Aboriginal art – the animation of the hallucination shows us the distorted faces of a sculpture of a group of elders – making for an oddly rebarbative piece of cinema.
In a nod to a sense of wider inclusivity, Palmer includes an interview with someone who tells us that their experience of psychedelics made them go back and reexamine their ancestral culture. The interviewee appears to be of central Asian heritage. Unfortunately, for reasons unexplained, during the interview they are shown cuddling up to an enormous stuffed toy dog, which kind of undermines for the viewer their credibility as an expert witness in an extremely bizarre scene.
The colonialist aspect of Palmer’s project fits well with their attempt to establish the scientific and commercial credibility they appear to think essential in making the case for legalisation. At one point a science academic informs us that Australians will lose out in some notional scientific competition with those dastardly Americans, if the government does not approve research into psychedelics.
Ultimately, the ‘great spirit’ that is being conjured into being here is the dollar bill. The business school shtick and worship of that sacred deity Entrepreneurship made me almost nostalgic for the ancient days when every time we dropped acid, we imagined it truly was a blow against The Empire.
For anyone interested in the modern history of the use of psychedelics, Contemplations: On The Psychedelic Experience will just about repay a visit to the cinema. For anyone else, watch it online – skip through the sacred entrepreneurship balderdash and find Diatchenko’s The Ipswich Exorcism and Subba’s Visions of Ganesh – they are absolute gems.